It is a story and a vademecum. He is serious (the theme is, breast cancer is) but he also knows how to make you smile, starting with the title, even though you smile bitterly. “I won a biopsy“(Maria Magherita Bulgarini publisher, 14 pp, 16 euros), the volume he wrote Minnie Luongomedical-scientific journalist, many essays behind him and 30 years of collaborations with Corriere della Sera, that’s it. It’s one thing and another: made with the contribution of another science journalist, Paola Emilia Ciceroneand the preface by Paolo Veronesi, director of the Breast Program of the European Institute of Oncology – is in fact a “double” book.
Two books in one
Yes, it is the story told in the first person (the first part of the volume) of an experience of illness – and of friendships (many), of drops of valium (a little) and of travel (a couple), but it is also a manual flight to deal with breast cancer and not feel unprepared, as the subtitle says. That is a service text, a useful tool for all women who find themselves having to face the same situation as Minnie. And since it is also a manual, inside there are information sheets on techniques and drugs, and there are tips: we learn for example what to pack before hospitalization, what it is and how to get a heparin puncture, how to treat wounds after discharge from the hospital. Then there are also (the second part of the volume) interviews with breast cancer specialists: from the oncologist to the surgeon, from the geneticist to the nurse, from the radiologist to the psycho-oncologist. And finally (we are in the third part) there are the contact details and missions of the most active patient associations that deal with oncology active in the peninsula.
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by Irma D’Aria
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The book is “double”, again, because its author is two things together: he is patient, and therefore a vulnerable person by definition. But she is also a journalist: that is, one who observes and asks for a living and does not discount. And that however, for once, it is not she who observes, but she who is observed. Sometimes with a lot of distraction. Everything starts from the phone call from the young lady who tells her to go back to the diagnostic center after a mammogram that was obviously not perfect (anxiety and impatience to know) up to, and beyond, the “you lady won me a biopsy” reported on the title (which is not it’s a joke, but they are the words really spoken by a doctor).
oncoitalia
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by Dario Rubino
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Not all doctors listen
The book is also enriched with the reflections, considerations, comments and ideas of Paola Emilia Cicerone, an expert in the doctor-patient relationship, and her forays into the narrative stimulate the reader to reflect on how important (and still rare today) to invest on correct communication between those who care and those in need of being treated. And on how difficult, or in any case not obvious, it is still for the patient to get listening and attention, even when one turns to an excellent structure. “It is one thing to write for more than thirty years about medicine for the major national newspaper and to have published more than a dozen essays on the subject – reads the fact sheet accompanying the volume – quite another to suddenly find oneself on the patient’s side. Suddenly [l’autrice] he realizes that all the notions dispensed are not sufficient when one finds oneself in front of some – not all, fortunately – doctors who do not explain, do not listen, and above all lack empathy “.
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by Marta Musso
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Communication: a problem of third millennium medicine
The difficulty of doctor-patient dialogue – writes Paolo Veronesi in the preface – is one of the great problems of the medicine of the third millennium. Which seems like a paradox: we do nothing but communicate everywhere, all of us as well as the doctors. But on closer inspection a paradox is perhaps not, because it is one thing to communicate with transparency, competence and fairness, which many doctors do on many newspapers or websites, another thing is to be able to listen and know how to speak “within a relationship to two, in which one person, the patient, entrusts to another, the doctor, what is most precious, health and often life “.
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by Tiziana Moriconi
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Here, this thing here is not so simple, as Minnie’s story attests and somehow even denounces. In Minnie’s story there are good doctors, but also distracted professionals, unable to find the right words, hasty health care workers, who have the wrong language and ways (which are never form, much less when the interlocutor fears for her health). Language and manners ranging from overly aloof to really too familiar. Yet, for years the question of doctor-patient communication has been discussed and there is a literature on the subject. And there are validated protocols that indicate, for example, how to communicate diagnoses, as Cicero exemplifies.
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The obstacles: time for words and empathy
The main obstacles to overcome to improve this situation? Veronesi lists three of them: time first of all, then words. “Rarely does the doctor know the patient so deeply that he can adapt his words to the person in front of him. So when he talks to his patient, the most enlightened doctor tries to find a balance between the correctness and clarity of the information, being precise, but not abstruse, in order to convey hope, without ever deceiving. The search for the right language for every patient is a great commitment, which not everyone undertakes, and which inexorably places us in front of the third obstacle: empathy ”. Empathy is the ability to identify with the other, it is made up of words but also of gestures and looks, and is the cement of the doctor-patient relationship. It can be cultivated and developed, but it is largely innate, Veronesi says. He’s right, which means that the rest, at least that, can be learned.